Currently, public school teachers in California are essentially guaranteed lifetime employment if they can make it through their first two years on the job. This brief period in which a teacher earns tenure, or, more accurately, “permanent employee status,” puts a lot of pressure on principals. They are forced to make a decision after just 16 actual teaching months — by March of a teacher’s second year — whether or not someone is good enough to spend their professional career influencing hundreds, and in many cases thousands, of young minds. About 98 percent of all teachers who seek tenure receive it in the Golden State.

The latest attempt to rework teacher permanence comes from Assemblywoman Shirley Weber. Cosponsored by Teach Plus and Educators for Excellence, two teacher-led activist organizations, the San Diego Democrat has introduced legislation that would extend the time it takes to attain permanent status from two years to three. Assembly Bill 1220 would also allow some teachers who don’t meet the requirements within three years an extra year or two, during which time they could get additional mentoring and receive other professional development resources.

So, depending on a teacher’s effectiveness, the permanence perk would be moved from two to as many as five years. While a principal may not want to take a chance on a teacher who is not doing well in his first two years, the added time frame might see that teacher blossom — or it might not. Hence, it’s a crapshoot for his students.

Just last year, Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, introduced Assembly Bill 934, a much tougher bill. As originally written, it would have placed poorly performing teachers in a professional support program, but if they received a second low performance review after a year in the program, they could be fired via an expedited process, regardless of their experience level. But the California Teachers Association rejected the bill because it “would make education an incredibly insecure profession.” After CTA arm-twisting, AB934 was eviscerated so badly that most of its original supporters decided that the new version was unacceptable, and it was eventually killed by the Senate Education Committee.

Not surprisingly, CTA opposes AB1220. “Two years is plenty of time for an administrator to figure out whether someone is performing well or not,” CTA spokesman Frank Wells told me, and “we believe the current law works.” Wells added that changing the law would discourage newer teachers from entering the profession.

However union leaders may try to disparage AB1220, the bill is hardly radical, as 42 states set tenure at three or more years. In fact, three states don’t offer tenure at all, which brings up the question of why teachers need permanent status. Doctors, lawyers and accountants have no such entitlements. Why teachers? The stock teacher response is that permanent status is important “so that I can advocate for my students without fear of losing my job.” This statement is ludicrous. What kind of teacher or principal would not “advocate for their students”? In fact, to really advocate for your students, you should demand an end to permanence — period. Thousands of students stuck with underperforming teachers, not to mention their parents and taxpayers, would be much better off.

It is scandalous that because of this law, in concert with arcane dismissal statutes, California is able to fire just 2 teachers a year out of about 300,000 for incompetence, especially in a state where student National Assessment of Educational Progress scores languish at the bottom of the barrel. And this points to the biggest problem with AB1220: What do you do with a burned out teacher who, after 20 years in the classroom, is just going through the motions, spending the day ignoring his students, adding to his pension, dreaming of the beach in Hawaii where he will retire? The answer is, you can’t do a darn thing.

That said, AB1220 is slightly better than the law on the books, and should be supported. But we really need to go much further and promote a system where teachers must earn their right to stay on the job throughout their career — just like any other professional.

Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network.